04-10-2021, 10:50 AM
(04-10-2021, 10:17 AM)Beaker Wrote: I have given a lot of thought and reading to religions. My thought is that religion was created as a way to explain the unknown. As people do, ideas diverged and therefore so did religion. In other words, as soon as opinions divided about those explanations of the unknown, people branched off with their own ideas, thus the plethora of different religions. Religions also quickly became a way of gaining power and controlling people...a corruption from what they were originally intended to be. I think all religions hold some pieces of truth, but no one religion has all the truth. As science has gained ground and provided concrete evidence for explaining the previously unknown, the need for religion has lessened. I can easily see religions slowly fading out over time, yet exploring the idea of something beyond us persisting until we figure it out.
I agree with this, but go a little further.
Originally religion was created to explain external phenomena like the stars, and weather, and seasons, and natural disasters. But at some point it was turned to introspection to explain our own existence, and behavior, and death. It changed from explaining the unknown of "how" things were created to "why" they were created. I think this change happened when people became social creatures and learned the could survive better in groups than alone. At that point we had to understand our common feelings and how we related to the rest of the world instead of just considering our own feelings and survival.
